Intravenal Sound Operations US Schallplatten & CDs

Review: Diamanda Galas' latest full-length album is a live project, centring on select recordings from two shows that the artist played in 2017. Pieced together from Galas appearances at Chicago's Thalia Hall and Seattle's Neptune Theatre respectively, the album hears her in performance paired solely with the piano, which makes for a stark contrast compared to the instrumental ambition and breadth of her recorded music. Still nonetheless straddling all her best stylistic hallmarks - from ranchera to rembetika to soul to free jazz - Galas achieves it all in a single seven-performance swoop.

Review: The 1986 sonic pentad by Diamanda Galas, Saint Of The Pit, is the second of two records forming the devised, pestilent occult rite - in her terms, the "plague mass" - known as the Masque Of The Red Death. In clairvoyant dialogue with the first part (The Divine Punishment), both records, in symbiosis, are said to possess an innate correctitude, with saintly playback "possible at maximum volume only." When we oblige by Galas' command, we find ourselves thickly immersed in the kind of sonic esoterics that only the most adept of oneiromancers might be able to swallow and integrate into their mantic: waspish whispers, dulotic dirges, heathen hums. Galas' episcope is a dissenting, idolatrous projection in sound and vision, with 'Artemis' and 'Deliver Me' spanning red-robed, sectarian vocal operatics, not to mention their backing, low-noted, open piano chord strikes. The *eschaton* of the record is, of course, is its quintessential fifth star-point: 'Cris D'aveugle (Blind Man's Cry)', on which Galas, the occult visionary, profanes the lyrical votive candle wax with blasphemous talk of nailed eyes and desecrated caskets.